Look, I’ve been thinking about this and yeah, I’m going to drop Kimi ni Todoke. It was an interesting enough experience, but it’s at this point become too much of a chore to blog it, as a lot of people pointed out. It could have been a nice slice of life-series, but having to write about it on a weekly basis, it just got on my nerves a little too much.

The series in italics don’t fit one of the restrictions. Out of the posts that suggested more than three series, I selected the first three that met the restrictions.

Well, so much for the poll. I just discovered that someone has been spamming nearly 30 votes for Koi Kaze. If you’re really going to be that immature about it, then I’ll just cancel this little contest.

I’m still going to blog an old show. Instead, I’ll just pick the series that seems the most interesting out of the ones you suggested. I’ll decide which one it’s going to be after I get home from university.

I think that at the time that I started this blog, I never would have guessed that I’d still have it four years later; it really was created on a whim, and eventually I just never had any intention or reason to quit it. Anyway, today marks Star Crossed’s fourth anniversary. Like I also did in the previous years, here are some statistics:

General Statistics:
Up till now, I’ve made 3019 posts, regularly blogged 108 different television series and 13 movies and OVAs.
The site has been received 3020186 unique visitors, which consist out of 1942846 first time visitors and 1257340 returning ones. (Basically, in the past year I received nearly the same amount of visitors as in the entire first three years combined).
18085 comments have been posted (many thanks to everyone who posted one)

Top-10 Most Accessed Series:
(note that this list is from the past year only, otherwise it’d just look too much like the list I made a year ago)
10. Michiko e Hatchin
9. Guin Saga
8. Bonen no Xamdou
7. Mushishi
6. Jigoku Shoujo
5. Pandora Hearts
4. Phantom
3. Casshern Sins
2. Higurashi no Naku Koro ni
1. Full Metal Alchemist - Brotherhood

Top-10 Most Accessed Posts: (a bit one-sided this time)
10. Hajime no Ippo - New Challenger Review
9. Which Autumn Series do you want me to blog?
8. Full Metal Alchemist - Brotherhood - 23
7. Full Metal Alchemist - Brotherhood - 26
6. Mahou Shoujotai Review (for a series that had such an enormous impact on me, I surely did write a crappy review of it).
5. Full Metal Alchemist - Brotherhood - 27 (the internet is weird… this post is barely a month old… and it’s about a bloody recap…)
4. Bonen no Xamdou - 02
3. Full Metal Alchemist - Brotherhood - 19
2. Darker than Black Review
1. Top 10 Anime (the old version)

Top-10 Google Keywords: (aside from the obvious ones as “psgels”, “star crossed” and variations of “top 10 anime”)
10. Umineko no Naku Koro ni
9. Pandora Hearts Blog
8. Saiunkoku Monogatari Season 3
7. Genji Monogatari Sennenki
6. Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood 23
5. Guin Saga
4. Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood 27
3. Mouryou no Hako
2. Aoi Bungaku
1. Darker than Black Review
(Especially number 2 and 3 surprise me: those were the last two series I expected to generate lots of hits O.o)

Amusing search-terms (I can’t believe how many screwed up ones I managed to find this year…)
anime girl with 5 different personalities - Schizophrenia, anyone?

crazy person claiming to be the real neo trinity forum - I don’t know what’s worse: a person claiming such a thing, or people actually searching for this guy…

dress up kurenai sense but first she has to be naked - What the heck did this guy have in mind? O.o

hi me anime - Hi… um, me psgels

porfy is a stupid name. say it. porfy. - It’s short for Porphyras, a greek name. Obviously it’s going to sound wierd in English.

anime in which a star turns into a skateboard? - Oh god, please no!

anime were can i buy paprika - at the local supermarket?

how to blog anime - Go to wordpress.com, register and start writing

how to make an anime with you as the star - You really don’t want that to happen.

sky bolg of nice girl - Even though this is a typo, I have no idea what this guy was trying to find with this term…

what does 3 year anniversary mean - That something is three years old, idiot.

what season is august in - You seriously needed to search for this?

26 + 74 = one hundred - Erm… thank you for this piece of information…

japan, producing of the worlds weirdest shit since 1952 - Certainly!

a 13 to 15 line paragraph on how i betrayed my best friend - Write it yourself, how should I know about that friend of yours?

a anime where you can see girls - You’re going to have to be a bit more specific than that. ;)

who blogs star crossed anime - I do.

humanity calls out for a hero… can a child of ruin be the savior of mankind? anime - Oh no, not another one!

i can’t understand your blogs cuz of your bad english - Um… sorry. I’ll try to type more clearly from now on.

i will force that reasoning aside with my unreasonableness” - I like this one.

when did june start 09 - Um… on June 1st, 2009?

when some when apologize and i dont want .. nicknames - Why?

a letter to have good first impression from a nice girl - Again, write one yourself.

at the beginning, to begin with, afterwards, finally, after a while - Get on with it!

i have a great idea for an anime but don’t know what to do with it - Here’s my advice: just go sit in a corner, and wait until the idea goes away.

i’m not fully understood - Who is?

i’ve been a princess - Who isn’t?

interesting metallic thing - I really wonder what this guy was hoping to find when he typed this in…

what’s the weird anime that anne is not telling me about - … no comment.

“parents are still alive”, anime - That’s rare…

what would kaiba say - “Screw the rules I have money” (only the ones who watched the Abridged Yugioh will get this reference, but ah well).

is that a motha-fuckin’ rpg?! is that a motha-fuckin’ rpg in a backpack?! - This one’s my favourite. ^^;

IRC-Channel
Oh and if I recall correctly, a few months some people requested an irc-channel. So, why not:

#starcrossed @ irc.chatspike.net

This is pretty much an experiment, but if it catches on I’ll post a link to it somewhere on the main page.

Today I’ll unfortunately be away from the rest of the day, which means that my entries of Basquash, Phantom and Tokyo Magnitude are going to be delayed by a day. It’s not really that much of a deal, but I know from experience that people are going to start wondering what happened to me if I’m more than 24 hours late with an episode. ^^;

Anyway, for those who are wondering what I’m going to be doing: today I’m going to help out the staff of the GOGBOT Festival in Enschede. It doesn’t really have to do anything with anime, but it’s a festival that’s geared to Multimedia in general, centred around a theme (this year, it’s Atompunk). For the Dutch people around here: if you happen to be around as well, why not drop by? You can probably find me at the centre of the festival, at the BlueTube stand.

I have a question for the people who have been keeping up with the latest episodes of Gintama. As some of you may know, I’ve been keeping up with Rumbel’s subs for the series. Now that Horriblesubs have released the final missing episodes between Rumbel’s and the start of Crunchyroll’s, I decided to slowly marathon up to the latest episodes. Right now, I have just finished episode 124 and am seriously considering to drop the series altogether.

My question to you is: is Gintama really going to improve?

Because seriously, my patience at this point has entirely run out. I have heard that around episode 140, this series gets serious again with a bunch of good episodes around Kagura’s past, but is that really going to be worth it if the creators are going to delve into boring fillers again? Is it really going to be worth it, watching a dozen episodes, just to get to one good one?

Ever since the new director took over at episode 101 for me, this series has lost all of its charms, but I had faith in the series, hoping that it might pick itself back up. However, then I reached episode 120, which was the funniest episode ever since this guy took over. So what was the best joke in that episode? A rip-off of one of the best jokes of the first director. It was at this point that I realized that it was getting pointless to watch this series.

I truly rate the first 100 episodes among the top comedies I have ever seen. Sure, it also did have its share of weak episodes, but those were vastly outnumbered by the number of awesome and really well written episodes. The new director however just failed to live up to it in every single way. The penis jokes for example have become way too obvious, and that’s just the tip of the ice-berg.

Another pet peeves of the new director is that he tries to stuff in as much references to other shounen series as possible. I’m always in for a good parody, but that’s the problem: instead of parodying, the new director is simply listing a bunch of references without making fun of them. After a while this becomes really, really boring.

Then there’s also the matter of the increase of lengthy arcs. In the first 100 episodes, the only arcs that took up more than 2 episodes were the ones that mattered: the ones that developed the characters and made optimal use of their length. Right now the long arcs are just dragging on beyond belief, often wasting entire episodes with things that can be solved within only 10 minutes. The biggest example of this are episodes 121, 122 and 123: what the heck was the point in dragging this on for three episodes? The entire story would have fit into just a half of an episode, and instead it became an utterly predictable bore-fest that just would not end.

A more fundamental problem however is that the quality of the script-writing has gone down a lot. The first 100 episodes were really good at tugging at my heart-strings, not through its characters, but because of its subtle writing that knew exactly what to say. Especially the long monologues of the characters were deep, meaningful and really got the best out of the characters in the serious moments. That’s completely gone now as well. The dialogue has become uninspired, cheap, and way too much focused on over the top violence in an attempt to make up.

I’m really beginning to feel that I’m just watching the show for the heck of it, which is a shame because there are many better shows at the moment that I’d rather spend my attention at. In the end, there really seems to be a curse on shounen series that go beyond the 100 episode mark: Dragonball Z would have been fine if it just ended after 26 episodes; it would have been a nice action series that way. Naruto was pretty much a good series until the start of the final Chuunin Examinations, after which it dragged its story on and on beyond belief. Bleach was also a very entertaining shounen series for its first 30 episodes… until it descended into a bunch of boring and predictable fights around the Ichigo the Marty Stu. Gintama lasted longer than the others, but in the end, my enthusiasm for the first 100 episodes is just completely gone at this point.

So yeah, if I do end up dropping it (which is pretty likely at this point), what do you want me to do? Write a review about just the first 100 episodes, or is that review not really necessary?

Now that it’s September again, I’d like to return to a yearly tradition for this blog in the form of a little contest I hold every year. It basically consists out of a poll of the series that are going to be airing in the upcoming fall season, and me blogging whatever series that received the most votes. In the past, this lead me to blog Claymore, Gundam 00 and Tytania.

Anyway, here are some concrete rules:
- To make a valid vote, drop a comment leaving your selection. You can select up to two series from the upcoming Autumn season.
- The anime with the most amount of votes in the end will be blogged for at least 12 or 13 episodes (in the very unlikely event that the series in question becomes way too much of a chore to cover).
- Here is a list with the shows that are scheduled to air. (At least, that’s what I assume. Notify me if it isn’t complete).
- No direct sequels; that’s just boring and predictable.
- Apart from that, I accept any series with an airdate between September 20th and November 11th.
- Please refrain from spoiling synopsises or staff lists. I’m still trying to enter the Autumn Season with as little information as possible about the upcoming shows, and I’d like to keep it that way.
- The poll will end at September 30, 23:59 GMT. All votes that arrive after that will be ignored.

Here are the current scores:
Kimi ni Todoke - 44
Romance of the Three Kingdoms - 36
Kobato - 34
Kuuchuu Buranko - 31
Winter Sonata - 25
Letter Bee - 23
Armed Librarians: Book of Bantora - 18
A Certain Scientific Railgun - 14
Seiken no Blacksmith - 11
Fairy Tail - 11
Jungle Emperor Leo - 8
Darker than Black - 8
Sasameki Koto - 7
Blue Literature - 7
Nyankoi - 6
Kampfer - 3
Seitokai no Ichizon - 2
Ai no Kusabi - 2
Yumeiro Patissiere - 1
Sora no Otoshimono - 1
Note that with comments that selected three series, I just picked the first two. The people who voted for Darker than Black II and ignored the “No Sequels”-rule can of course always change their votes.

A Second Note: it just turns out that Jungle Emperor Leo isn’t going to be a TV-series at all, but instead just a TV-Special. Those who voted for it can of course change their votes.

You know, wasn’t this summer season supposed to suck? I mean, from the things I caught here and there this seemed to be a rather small and underwhelming season. And yet, I have only seen five new series so far (four if you don’t count the umpth Saint Seiya), of which three of them are already interesting enough to blog, and have a lot of potential to become great series. Is the rest of the season going to be filled with dumb harems and Code Geass clones or something?

In any case, with series airing a week before the rest of the season, it’s always hard for me to decide whether or not to blog them, because I have no idea whether or not there are going to be any better series turning up later. For Umi Monogatari it’s the same, as the majority of the new season has yet to air. Still, this episode definitely showed me that this series has a lot going for it, and I can always drop it if even more better shows pop up.

I’m obviously not blogging this series for the aestetics. While the animation is great, I first want to see it remain great for the next couple of episodes, and the art style itself is rather plain, with your average collection of moe stereotypes (one of the lead characters has yellow hair, one has red hair and one blue hair. Gee, those are the three primary colours, where have I seen that one before?). There’s lots of fanservice and all, but thankfully it’s handled tastefully: you don’t see any close-ups to jiggling boobs or strange crotch shots. That’s enough to keep it from getting annoying.

What caught my interest with this series was its characterization. The spring season already had a lot of series with an excellent cast of characters, and Umi Monogatari sounds like a nice addition to them. The three main characters feel realistic and very sympathetic. There are a lot of emotions in this series, but none of it feels like cheese, and it’s surprisingly genuine. It’s the charms of the main cast that really makes me want to watch more, and it makes for a pretty relaxing series with still a lot of drama.

The storyline is obviously going to need a bit more work (evil demons have been unsealed and need to be stopped by a certain sea priestess and air priestess), but I like how this series toys with your expectations. Along with unsealing those evil powers, the little mermaid also unsealed a rather strange turtle. That one I didn’t see coming.

Rating: * (Good)
Successfully carries the atmosphere further with some great animation and characters, even though the plot is a bit clichéd.

Saint Seiya The Lost Canvas

Short Synopsis: Our lead character has huge powers for no particular reason and gets to become a saint.
Chance of me Blogging: 0% (No way)
Okay, so I’m pretty much a Saint Seiya noob: I’ve never watched anything of the franchise, despite how it seems to be churning out an OVA every year. So yeah, this felt like a good opportunity to check out and see what this franchise was all about. Well, if the rest of the installments are anything like this first episode, then it’s a franchise full of hopelessly bad acting and stereotypes. Seriously, this episode starts with a bunch of generic bullies nearly killing a dog, only for one of the lead characters to act like a flower-child and protect it. The other lead character is your typical hot-blooded teen-aged lead, only exaggerated even more than usual. The episode was full of inconsistencies or things that just didn’t make any bloody sense; my favourite of this has to be the point where a river was blocked by a bunch of rocks from a landslide. So what does our main character do? HE TRIES TO PUNCH HIS WAY THROUGH THE ROCKS. Granted though, the animation looked really nice and the backgrounds looked pretty. But pretty pictures aren’t going to excuse the disaster that is the cast of characters.

Fight Ippatsu! Juuden-Chan!

Short Synopsis: Our lead character hasn’t been toilet-trained properly and Deus ex Machinas depressions away.
Chance of me Blogging: 0% (No way)
It’s stupid, clichéd, full of fanservice and stereotyped. But still I have to admit that it made me laugh at times. This is basically another shounen mahou shoujo, but for once the chemistry between the male and female lead was enjoyable, rather than annoying. The problem with this series however, is that that’s just about the only thing that I liked. The visuals look horrible, the background music is generic voice-less J-Pop. The drama is incredibly shallow: it’s built up poorly and simply solved because the lead character has the power make depressions go completely away. It just screams laziness to me. The fanservice also was abysmal at times. Fully unneeded, especially in the ED, and you know a character is bad when she still pees in her pants.

Umi Monogatari

Short Synopsis: Our lead character lives under water.
Chance of me Blogging: 40% (If the rest of the season is mediocre)
Another series with lots of moe, but it’s actually pretty interesting. Umi Monogatari tells the story of a tribe of people who live underwater and use strange rings to move to the shore. It’s got an ambient atmosphere with lots of quiet piano background songs. The pacing is also quiet yet at the end o the episode there were definitely some dark pasts. A major theme of this episode also was cultural differences, which can become quite interesting as well if the series develops it properly. My one gripe with this episode was the comedy, though; it just felt forced, so that’s a potential problem for the future of this series. I know that ZEXCS isn’t the best company out there, and the animation and visuals really are nothing special, but if they can make this series as solid as they did with Wagaya no Oinarisama, then I’m in.

Okay, so most of you probably know that I don’t write a lot of editorials because I suck at them, but I still want to say a few words about this subject. After Howling-Kun mentioned the DVD-sales of certain shows in the shoutbox, I started looking at some of the other data in this topic. Now, this is not going to be a rant on how most of my favourite shows aren’t getting any DVD-sales. Everyone’s of course entitled to what he wants to buy (although it does get harder and harder to associate myself with this fandom when shows like Training with Hinako top the charts…).

Instead, those rankings reminded me of all the fuzz that’s going on, and how many people seem to be claiming that “anime is dying”. With this many times that the same doom-scenarios popped up, I almost started believing this myself, until I saw the actual facts in the following graph of DVD-sales in the topic mentioned above.

Well, I may not be an economist or anything near it, but here is my interpretation of the graph. First of all, I don’t get any of those arguments about how anime is supposed to be dying. Sure, sales have gone down compared to 2005, but that’s just a very selective analysis: compare it to ten years ago, and you can see a huge increase in sales. The decline in sales of the past years is about the equivalent of a kick in the groin: sure, you’re going to be walking funny for the next couple of hours, but “dying” is a big overstatement.

The thing is, that the year with the biggest sales was 2005. Interestingly enough, the response in 2006 to this was a huge increase in the amount of different anime titles that was released, as everyone seemed to be profiting from this boom in the sales of the industry. Unfortunately though: just like in the stock market, when sales suddenly go up, this isn’t going to continue forever. Right now, the anime industry is trying to find a new balance amidst the significantly increased interest in anime for the past ten years, and until it has found this the market is going to wobble around like a drunk student on his way home.

And as for the relatively low sales figures of 2008: did you seriously expect anything different with the current economic crisis? The recession has also hit Japan very hard, so it’s of course to be expected that last year’s sales would decrease. What I actually haven’t seen yet is people who are looking at the future. Sure, reports like this are nice and all, but they seem to assume that this recession is going to take forever.

With a bit of luck, the economic crisis is going to be mostly over in 2011 which is going to allow the industries to recover. So what’s going to happen with anime when that point arrives? When that point arrives, people are going to have more and more money to spend on anime, so there actually is a chance for a very solid recovery in the not-so-distant future. Who knows?

And really, as long as producers are able to churn out well-produced series of which they know are never going to sell well, I’m not buying those “anime is dying”-arguments anymore. As long as there are Genji Monogataris, Himitsus, Porfys and Kaibas, it shows that the animation companies aren’t at the real edge of destruction.

A few months ago, I was asked if I could do a post once in a while about some of my other interests aside from anime. It took me a while to think of something interesting to write, but I figured that I might as well use this post to keep track of the different books and novels I read from time to time. Do note that this list is over the scope of a couple of years: I’m a very slow reader, and usually take three months to finish one book. These all have nothing whatsoever to do with anime or Japan: most are either American thrillers, fantasy or European history, or a combination between these. Do note that some of these entries contain spoilers.

The Dreamers 1: The Island Thurn - David Eddings & Leigh Eddings
A story that takes place in a fantasy world, where a huge focus is spent on building up, and setting everything up correctly. While it’s a bit too caught up in its need to do everything by the book, give every single character background and enough time to develop, up to the point that there’s not much excitement along the way (nothing really happens through the first three quarters of the book), it does deliver nicely in the end, although nothing spectacular.

The Magic Circle - Catherine Neville
The prime example of how you can also get too convoluted. This novel set out with grand ambitions, as it attempted to tell a plot that spreads across 2000 years, with a story containing a huge amount of symbolism, referencing Jesus, Hitler some Roman Emperors and other notable historical figures all caught up in it. In the end, though, it becomes clear that it never really knew what it wanted to go for, and the story didn’t really accomplish anything, other than establishing the ridiculously complex family history of the female lead character. Seriously, in the end the twists about her family became so formulaic that you can almost predict the exact page at which the next increasingly ludicrous plot twist would arrive. It’s got a lot of nice trivia, though. The author really did some intensive historical research on this one.

The Collectors - David Baldacci
A very nice in-depth look in how con artists do their jobs, as we follow a group of four of them as they try to get away with a multi-million dollar scam. Great attention to detail, and a huge focus on careful preparation, only ruined by a joke of an ending which forsakes everything that the story has been building up for and instead goes for a nonsensical action end. The other story that runs parallel through the book also isn’t the most interesting: a bunch of old people solving a murder may sound good on paper, but it’s not the most exciting thing out there.

The Golden Compass - Philip Pullman
Excellent book, and I still need to get my hands on the continuation of this one. The whole idea of every person being accompanied by his own daemon (a sort-of animal that accompanies him everywhere; they even can change shapes for children) is fleshed out really well. The lead character may be just a little girl, but she’s a very likable lead. This is one story that gets increasingly better as it goes on.

Gone Baby Gone - Dennis Lehane
Absolutely fantastic. There’s no other way I can say it. The sheer imagination with which such a police thriller is told still amazes me. It’s an in-depth look at police cases involving missing children. It tells the story about two detectives, looking for a missing four year-old girl, and continues to keep the reader in the dark throughout the largest part of the book. But when a second child disappears, it finishes with an incredibly strong final quarter. I can safely say that this has been the best book I’ve ever read.

The Lost Labyrinth - Kate Mosse
This book tells about two stories as they intertwine: one about 12th century Carcasonne (France), and the other, happening about 8 centuries later. The former one is really good, with a likable female lead and a story that gets increasingly more interesting. The latter, however, just feels like second fodder in comparison. It’s full of plot holes, lacks detail and especially the romance that pops up near the end from out of nowhere feels a bit jarring. It’s got quite a few nice ideas, though.

Deverry: Daggerspell - Katherine Kerr
I’m only nearly halfway through this one at the moment, but I’m having a lot of trouble to get through it. Basically, this book is the first one of a large series of fantasy novels as it tells of a series of very annoying romances. Seriously, we have this guy who already was screwed in the head. His father dies and he continuously angsts and throws tantrums about it. He then proceeds to screw his sister and kill his best friend (no, really). When the bugger finally dies, you’d think that the annoyance finally stops, but no: he reincarnates, and the annoying romance starts all over again. Sure, in the end the story might have a very good conclusion, but I’m about to just drop it because people continue to behave like complete and unlikable imbeciles.

So yeah, one thing I noticed is that each medium has its own share of strengths and weaknesses. The things I noticed with these novels is that in nearly all cases, the thing that decides whether they succeed or not is their final quarter, the rest is all or mostly build-up. Nearly all of the above-mentioned ones either had very promising first halves, only to fall apart completely in the end, or fairly uneventful first halves, only to come together wonderfully in the end.

Another thing I can appreciate is the large diversity of lead characters. Okay, I may have just picked out the right books for this, but it feels like every lead character of the ones mentioned above comes from a different age group, as opposed to anime which tents to usually pick out teenagers. Still, the reason why I prefer anime to novels at this point is that novels lack the ability to suck me in and create an atmosphere. I’m a big fan of all sorts of things multimedia, and the thing I like about anime is how it combines all these things (audio, visuals, storytelling, etc) in order to create a coherent story. So yeah, in the end it’s just a matter of personal preference here, though with some of the above mentioned books, I’m glad to be able to have read them. Especially in the case of Gone Baby Gone. There are geniuses in every single kind of medium.

I may update this entry in the future as I read more. In the meantime, what are some of your favourite novels? I’m really a noob at this medium, so some help in deciding what to read next is always appreciated. ^^;

Well, it’s the time of the year again where I’m swamped with work, right before the Christmas Break. I’m having exams (or finals or whatever you call them in English) next week, and so I can’t use the distraction of blogging right now.

I’ll be back next week Friday.